Digitization today is not just a growth driver, it is an existential requirement for all organizations.

The speed of experimentation governs the pace of innovation today. Customers and subsequently business demands are driving organizations to design, develop and deliver digital offerings at scale. They need to collect, learn and effectively adopt customer feedback and customize products or services on an ongoing basis. For this, organizations need to stay flexible, and agile and be able to deliver applications swiftly and reliably.

To accommodate customer demand, organizations have moved from traditional monolithic applications to distributed microservices-based application architectures and containers (Kubernetes).

According to a recent study by Ubuntu-maker Canonical on Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, one of the biggest challenges that IT leaders face when migrating to and using Kubernetes and containers is that observability and monitoring requirements are not being effectively addressed.

Microservices enable organizations to easily scale and stay resilient. But, because of the several disparate services distributed across the hybrid multicloud environments, keeping track of the dozens to hundreds of microservices becomes a challenge. Further, it provides multiple points of attack, increasing complexity, expanding attack surfaces and accelerating security and compliance risks, which traditional monitoring solutions cannot address.

There are a myriad of cybersecurity solutions in the market for managing vulnerabilities, blocking misconfigurations, safeguarding workloads, discovering ransomware, etc. But what about the threats that you cannot see? Until now, a solution with comprehensive visibility was enough, but in today’s distributed microservice-based cloud-native landscape, you need more.

In order to keep up with the dynamic and complex system architectures, microservices, etc.  and scale at the speed of innovation, IT and security teams are under increasing pressure to predict, detect and act fast. As a result, IT leaders are looking to manage cybersecurity and compliance in these increasingly diverse, complex and ever-evolving architectures.

It is important to be aligned with everything that runs in production within multiple clouds and on-premise to avoid downtime and keep delivery cycles short. Security observability tools provide visibility into the security and compliance postures in distributed systems helping IT and security teams to control, detect and address risks quickly.

Understanding Security Observability

According to IBM’s 2022 Cost of Data Breach Report, detecting a cyberattack can take more than 200 days. This is more than enough time for attackers to enter and take their time exploiting your systems and stealing your data while you are completely unaware.

Detecting and remediating an attack early on, surely saves you time and money. What if you could go a step ahead and detect a security vulnerability even before the attack occurred? This is where Security Observability comes in.

According to Forrester, observability comes from what was done before, during, and after a system crash occurred so developers can trace, debug, and examine exactly what was happening and why it happened. Instead of getting information and details about why a system might have rebooted, you understand the underlying details of what was happening that caused it to crash. This understanding at a micro level is what will take security to its next level.

Security Observability is all about knowing and understanding security actions and behaviors. Knowing what is happening within your hybrid cloud environment in real-time is the best way to protect it. Security observability is different from traditional monitoring as it evaluates what is occurring and not what has already occurred. In that, it concentrates on getting a lay of the entire security and compliance landscape and revealing all potential threats, helping uncover threats that you cannot see at the moment.

How Can You Reduce Risks With Security Observability

With thousands of systems and processes running on the cloud, on-premise or both in an interconnected as well as disparate manner, tracing an incident or event to its origin requires comprehensive visibility and understanding on the complex distributed systems. Conventional monitoring techniques will not cut it. You need a system that delves deeper. Continuous security and compliance observability can

• Tackle alert fatigue: Observability goes down to understanding the root cause of an alert. It uses intelligence to determine what is being monitored and helps teams prioritize alerts and remediate risks accordingly.
•  Ensure continuous monitoring: Continuously monitor and analyze security-related events and data to identify potential security threats in real time. This helps organizations respond quickly to incidents and prevent further damage.
•  Enable log management: Collect and analyze log data from various systems, such as firewalls, network devices, and applications, to track suspicious activity and identify security threats.
•  Enhance threat intelligence: Stay up-to-date on emerging security threats and vulnerabilities by incorporating threat intelligence into your security observability strategy. This helps organizations proactively defend against attacks.
•  Improve incident response planning: Develop a comprehensive incident response plan to respond quickly and effectively to security incidents. This plan should include steps for investigation, containment, and remediation of security threats.
•  Automate to reduce human error: Automate repetitive tasks, such as data collection and analysis, to increase efficiency and reduce the risk of human error.
•  Implement Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions: Implement a SIEM solution to centralize security-related data and enable organizations to detect and respond to threats in real time.
•  Deploy user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA): Use UEBA to analyze user and entity behavior patterns to detect and respond to suspicious activity, such as insider threats and malware infections.

Benefits of Security Observability

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Data Classes That Aid Effective Security Observability

Logs

Based on the flow log Caveonix cloud can detect anomalies and potential risks that may exist in the environments. It can showcase which security groups are responsible for the ports that are open to internet and intranet access, thereby providing traceability of the network pathways. The platform has a separate view for flow visibility.

Metrics

Caveonix cloud provides a graphical and easy-to-understand view of the hybrid multicloud environment’s Risk Path Analysis (RPA) and Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) based on the security and compliance checks evaluated in the environment.

Traces

With hundreds of microservices interacting continuously with one another, it is important to trace logs and metrics. Caveonix cloud traces a clear path to the organization and application at risk based on the assets’ metrics and logs.

Working with these data classes is essential. However, it does not guarantee observability, especially when you are working in silos. Integrating the above-mentioned data classes in a single solution will help you implement a successful security and compliance observability strategy.

Caveonix’s unified platform helps you with a comprehensive view and understanding of all components of your hybrid multicloud environments. It continuously and extensively monitors, observes and assesses for any drift in security and compliance postures in near real-time. It will provide you with an understanding of not only, ‘when’ the incident occurred, but also ‘why’ and ‘how’, helping organizations stay a step ahead of sophisticated threat actors every single time.

Learn more about how we can enable your organization to stay a step ahead of security and compliance risks on the go. Book a demo